Only Alive In the Face of Death
by Spiga
Summary: Isobel's always had a problem with being fascinated by things that can kill her.
1. Chapter 1

I was actually inspired to do this after reading a particularly good Tyler/Katherine fic I can't seem to find anymore. Pity.

I'd like to expand this into a longer oneshot. Or maybe just incorporate it into Wolves on the Run. Depends on the reactions I suppose.

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><p>Tyler makes her laugh.<p>

He's not funny as in he has a good sense of humor, Tyler has a grim sense of self pity befitting a cursed shape shifter cut off from his home and family. And he's a teenager, so she's often at the forefront of a double dose of angst when dealing with him. Isobel finds herself laughing at him more often than laughing with him. He still thinks he's the big man on campus, still thinks he's the alpha dog. Still thinks he's in Mystic Falls and the name Lockwood means anything out here in the real world full of monsters and mayhem.

'Sorry Tyler, out here names mean nothing. Actions mean everything.' Jules tells him.

'This world doesn't respect you until it has a reason to _fear _you.' Isobel informs him after he huffs about how the other werewolves treat him like shit.

Damon is known throughout the world of vampires for his power and his cruelty and more than anything else his hedonisim. Doing as he wishes because nothing and nobody can stop him. Arrogant but strong enough to back it up. Stefan was once even more powerful, more bloodthirsty and more cruel. A true monster, a whirlwind of death and destruction that sucked in and chewed up everyone and everything in its path.

Isobel finds Tyler entertaining because for all his bluffing and posturing and attempts to bully her and everyone else around him he still doesn't have the stomach for the kill. He has the fangs and the claws, the strength and the speed, but he doesn't want them. He doesn't want to be a killer, he just wants to be _normal_. _Human_.

Which is a pity, because when Tyler kills it's a work of _art_.

She's never seen the young wolf working first hand, but she's seen the remains. Vampires that could punch through concrete and move with such blinding speed they disappear reduced to red smears and viscera splattered all over the walls. Vampires as old as Damon, as old as Katherine even, shredded and bitten and torn and already dying as the potency of Tyler's bite rots them into shambling piles of screaming goo dripping from yellowed and brittle bones.

She makes a point to be several states away from Tyler when the full moon rolls around but she always returns to see what he's left for her.

A witch that could boil a man's blood in his veins with her skull crushed and her rib cage pried open.

A coterie of vampires that now resemble nothing so fearsome as a few piles of rotten hamburger meat.

A group of hunters, vampire hunters, but Isobel imagines that they'd be game to take on a pair of werewolves. Nothing left behind but bones and blood and whatever bits Tyler doesn't like. (Never the kidneys and never the spleen, she notes.) He must not have had breakfast that morning.

He always eats the hearts though.

That's how she knows which kills are her boy's and which are Jules'. Rib cages pried open, lungs and stomach tossed away like garbage. Always the hearts. He gobbles down the things like they're going out of style.

"What are _you _smirking at?" he barks, furiously.

She looks up at him, he's sitting on the top of the mausoleum nestled between two stone angels. She can smell the liqueur on his breath, and she can read his body language like an open book. He's all depressed and broody. Working on his "moody teenage monster" façade no doubt. Isobel scurries up the side of the mausoleum like a spider to join him. The graveyard beneath was silent. All the little night creatures scared shitless by their presence.

"You did a number on that vampire in Seattle." she informs him.

This makes Tyler look even more miserable. Genuinely miserable.

Strangely she's…not sure that she likes it.

"What do you want, Kit?"

Kit, he calls her Kit. Short for Kit-Kat, because he only knows her as Katrina and also because he was eating such a chocolaty sugar stick the first time she introduced herself as such to the wolves. They had picked up on that lie of course, but she had…ways to bend the rules when it came to the bigger lies she fed them. Ways to skirt around their liar's sense. They weren't so stupid as to trust her outright but they had uses for each other.

That Tyler had given her a nickname had seemed rather…odd. Considering he didn't seem to be the nicknaming type.

She feeds him some bullshit half compliment, half answer. He doesn't need the werewolf lie detector gimmick to know she's mostly just here to poke the hornet's nest. Well, she also has business, but she always loved it when it coincided with pleasure.

"Get away from me, Katrina. I'm not in the mood for your bullsh-"

"Language, Mister Lockwood." she chides.

Tyler stands, towering over her and…right…_there_. Glowing yellow eyes and a very real scowl on his face. Isobel's always had a problem with being fascinated by things that can kill her, that's how she got in her current state. But she can't help but want to see it. There's the anger. That's what she wants to see. Tyler the werewolf, Tyler the predator.

Tyler the _killer_.

Those eyes, those terrible glowing yellow eyes.

Because that's what he is. That's what he was born to be, a predator from the moment he was conceived until the day he dies. (Soon enough, if Klaus gets his way.) And he's so terrified of what he truly is that he has no clue what to do with himself. All that muscle, all that skill and all he can do is follow Jules around and take orders like a dog.

It'd be in Isobel's best interest to use that. To grab to leash away from Jules and keep him as her loyal attack dog.

But it'd be such a waste.

So Isobel smiles sweetly and hold out her hand and Tyler's eyes fade to their normal color. Tyler takes it and helps her stand, and she slaps another hand against his chest. She lets him take her in his arms, and she can practically feel his hormones lowering his IQ and making him pliable. With their bodies pressed this close, he's putty in her hands. She could make him do anything-

His hands shoot up from her waist to her neck and apply crushing pressure to her throat and his face twists into anger.

"What do you _want _from me, Katrina?" Tyler snarls.

Ah, playing hard to get.

She digs her fingernails into his well built biceps and draws blood, with a swift kick to his gut she loosens his grip and manages the tear his hands from her throat. She throws herself against him and slams him heavily into the roof. The vampire is straddling him before he has the chance to retaliate.

"You, Lockwood. I want you."

Ah, he's listening now, she can feel the aggression drain from his body.

"I'm not stupid." he says.

'_No, you're a man. Same difference.' _Isobel doesn't say it out loud of course.

There's a gleam or embarrassment and lust and anger in his eyes and she knows that he's used to being the pursuer, not the pursued. But Isobel is no shrinking violet, no small town bimbo who'll bat her eyelashes at him and wait for him and the other meat head football players to beat each other in the skulls with their clubs until one of them wins and manages to raise enough mental power to string together a passable sentence to ask her out on a date. Isobel knows what she wants.

Right now she wants Tyler.

She can see he wants her too, but the distrust and anger inside him make him apprehensive. She rests her chin against his chest and makes puppy dog eyes. He sits up a bit and picks some of the hair from her face, gently, almost timidly.

"I can't figure you out, Katrina." he says.

"I'm a complicated woman."

She smiles and watches as the last remaining bastions of resistance go crumbling down behind Tyler's eyes. Putting his hands on her torso he sits her up on his abdomen while she starts to peal off her clothes. He's young and eager but his hands know just where to go, and while he's not Alaric (or even John) there a spark of something there. Of course that pretty much exemplifies everything about Tyler to Isobel. The spark of _something_, the potential for _something_, the seed of _something_. Isobel doesn't quite know what that _something _is yet, but she's decided that she'd like to see it through to the end.

When they fuck (not make love, not have sex, it's pure angry animal fucking) Isobel always feels like she's standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon with the wind blowing at her back and the edge of the canyon always _just _on the verge of crumbling beneath her feet. Always at the back of her mind is the thought that maybe, just maybe, he'll lose it this time and in the heat of passion take a chunk out of her face or shoulder. Or back. Or leg.

Of course that danger, if it's just imagined, is a big part of the thrill. It was a big part of the thrill when she was with Damon. It's funny to her in those little moments in between. She just can't seem to stop trying to seduce the thing that's sitting squarely above her on the food chain. Maybe playing her natural predators' like they were fiddles is the only way she can get her rocks off anymore. Maybe she just has a latent death wish. Maybe both.

She likes Tyler more than Damon though.

Tyler makes her laugh.

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><p>I'm...not really happy with this piece. I kind of like the pairing but mostly because it's unique but I don't really like the story itself. I don't know, give me some feedback.<p> 


	2. Chapter 2

I decided to do a small follow up. Still trying to hammer out the kinks in this pairing.

Gem1588: Glad you liked it. Again, I'm mostly exploring this pairing because it's different. It's rare for me to think up a pairing without someone having come up with it first. Perhaps that's why I decided to work on this one. Though, Tyler's aforementioned MILF fetish was a big consideration. And again, it's almost impossible to find a Tyler fic where he's not paired with Caroline. Or Jeremy. Or an OC. Not saying I'm not a Forbewood supporter, I even like Jyler when it's done well and not to sappy, but variety is the spice of life you know?

I'm working on Wolves on the Run right now, mostly doing long term plotting though. The actual chapter seven seems to be suspended in a state of half written-ness on my laptop. I haven't abandoned the story though.

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><p>He'll be angry later, right now the blow she lands on him both physical and emotional is so sudden and unexpected he's to stunned to be furious.<p>

"Sorry Tyler."

She says those two little words with a tiny shrug and a small frown as he comes to the realization she had been playing him from the start.

Funny, she doesn't seem sorry.

_Sorry, for manipulating and lying to you. Sorry, for tricking you into thinking I cared. Sorry, for making you believe you deserved to be in love again after what you did to Caroline._

"For the record, you were important to me. I never could have gotten this without you."

She smiles, and an hour ago that smile would have brightened his world but now he sees the cold triumph and self satisfaction in that vulpine grin and he wants to tear her pretty little head off her shoulders.

Now it just reminds him what a fool he is. How a pretty face and a few choice words whispered in the heat of passion can make him do anything.

_I don't love you, I never loved you._

He wants to say something to her, and a thousand responses run through his head in mere seconds and are discarded one by one . He could explode in anger, he could laugh in derision, he could threaten her life, he could ask her why. He knows why though. Because she's a vampire and treachery is her way.

No single reaction seems appropriate to him. He simply stares at her. Eyes cold and flat and calculating. Holding awareness but betraying neither thoughts nor feelings.

He can pick up the broken pieces of his heart later. Now he simply stares at her. As if trying to reconcile her physical beauty with the ugliness in her soul for just one moment. Trying to see her as he saw her before.

She says something else.

He doesn't hear it.

Because he's dwelling on the fact that not long ago he was a party to this exact same situation but with roles reversed. Caroline in the hands of the pack. Caroline being tortured. Caroline _being betrayed_. Caroline had cared about him, maybe even loved him. All it got her was pain and suffering and bitterness and heartache.

Now Tyler is in the hands of the enemy. Now Tyler was about to be tortured. Now Tyler was being betrayed by someone he had cared about. He might have been able to love Isobel, but like he had done not so long ago Isobel had shown what was really hiding beneath that pretty smile. Lies and cowardice and all the venom of the snake kingdom.

He feels as though she's crippled him, rendered him as blind and deaf and feeble as a newborn puppy.

But she always makes him feel that way, funny how the different situations can make him react to Isobel's unfailing ability to make him weak differently. Before it was endearing, alluring. Now that it's clear that everything between them was a lie all it does is remove the anesthetic.

He sees her for what she really is, and the worst part is that she's as much a mirror for him as Caroline was. He can trace every dark vein and twisted sinew that makes up the monster beneath her skin and the only difference between them is that the monster hiding inside him eats flesh and hearts and not blood. It's a savage and brutal monster.

But at least it has the decency to kill its victims.

Isobel seems rather content to let him twist in the wind for a while.

She seems to take a cold pleasure in unwrapping and straightening the twists and turns and sharp right corners of her plan. She lays it out straight for him, raw and naked before him. Lets him examine it, turn it over in his head, the part he had played. As if she was showing off, trying to impress him.

_See? See how clever I am, Tyler? See how smart your little Kit-Kat is? _

_Aren't you proud of me?_

"Don't feel bad, Tyler." Another smile, a small tilt of her head. "It could have happened to anyone."

It could have happened to anyone.

If she meant that to make him feel better, it didn't work.

Then again, she probably didn't.

Treachery is Isobel's way.

And Tyler is just the latest in a long line of fools to love her in spite of it.


End file.
